If Al Sharpton’s a Race Baiter, What Do Republicans Call Donald Trump? Hero.

For just over six years now, Barack Hussein Obama has been the president, and for all that time his detractors have been accused of dog-whistle, if not overt racism, and those same detractors have often resisted the racist label, instead claiming an earnest philosophical difference of opinion.

No matter how much racism did or didn’t color the way Obama was treated by members of his opponents’ party, can anyone really deny the racist undertones that exist in the Grand Old Party now? When you have Sarah Palin — a mouthpiece and symbol for the Tea Party if ever there was one — literally admonishing both immigrant and native born American to “speak American,” can there really be any doubt which side of the spectrum is currently courting America’s racists? I’ll give you a hint — screaming “speak English or go home” at people isn’t what’s inscribed on the plaque at Ellis Island, where the State of Liberty rests.

Palin’s super-ironic attack on people who don’t have a full mastering of the English language under their belt wasn’t the first pro-white American salvo fired this election season though; not by a long shot. Trump, Jeb(!) Bush, and Scott Walker all have come out in favor of isolationist and xenophobic policies ranging from building enormous walls on our borders to actually taking the extraordinary step of either repealing the 14th Amendment, or getting the Supreme Court to take up its interpretation for the first time in nearly 120 years just to deny people birthright citizenship. A Republican proposal to completely upend our citizenship and naturalization laws, and all because they’re afraid, deep down, that the brown people are going to come here, take our jobs, install socialist dictators, and suck the welfare teat dry, and they wonder why they get pegged as at the very least anti-immigrant and at the very worst downright racist?

Every time some high-profile case pops up where a white cop abuses — or worse, kills — a person of color and someone one like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton would show up in town to try and give comfort to the African-American community they’d get labeled as “race baiters.” You know, riling up the masses, ginning up anti-white hysteria by overplaying any racial subtext in the story. People like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have made millions and millions of dollars convincing already paranoid white folk that people like Sharpton and Jackson aren’t there to give their community peace of mind or to help everyone navigate the system; no they’re horrible reverse-racists that just want to bring the white man down.

What we really have in Trump — whether he is trolling them or not — is the GOP’s race baiting personified. It’s not called race baiting when conservatives do it though; it’s called conservative talk radio and Fox News programming.

They have huge chunks of our population absolutely convinced that brown people — whether African, Hispanic, Latino, or any other nationality or ethnicity of descent — are the ones mooching off of everyone. But how many racist redneck assholes in Texas do you think understand that $30 out of every $100 their state spends come from someone outside the Lonestar State paying taxes? They’re the welfare queens and takers; not the inner-city, “urban” families they believe it is.

Donald Trump is the lightning rod for all that racial disharmony that the GOP has been trading on for years now. They courted the Birthers — the morons who still don’t believe President Obama is an American citizen. They supported a guy in 2012 that said he’d be such a dick to undocumented immigrants that they’d just get up and leave — self deportation he called his idiotic policy idea. Every time a black kid is killed by a white cop the narrative on Fox News isn’t about our police forces’ use of deadly force, but whether or not Black Lives Matter is a “hate group.”

The irony of a political group that courts actual members of the Ku Klux Klan calling any other group a hate group is too much for me to process or respond to.

In 2016, it’s becoming clear that Donald Trump — for better, worse, or again, for his own troll-tastic amusement — has set up a massive, full-length mirror in front of the entire Republican Party. The great thing about this mirror is that it doesn’t just let the GOP see itself and its voters — which it most desperately needs to do — it let’s us all see the GOP for what they have really become. No, not all Republican voters hate the poor, hate immigrants, and especially hate poor immigrants, but they are the one party actively courting the people who do all of that. If Trump serves no other purpose than to scare the rest of the country into seeing just what kind of a nightmare they’d be in for if they put someone in office just because they’re a reality TV star and they may use buzzwords like “no more taxes,” then he’s done his part, ironically enough, to help make America a little better…if only by driving people away from the Republican Party forever.

If we’re going to call people like Sharpton and Jackson “race baiters,” even as they do nothing of the sort, then what do we call a man who whips up the fears of a subset of people — based on their race and ethnicity versus the race and ethnicity of others? Asshole, for starters. But the scary part is, if enough people aren’t scared by what they see in that full-length mirror, we could be calling that guy something far scarier than race baiter.